I still do not know how they do it, but every time I see them in real life they appear to be even smaller than the previous time I saw them. As a child I imagined them to be bison-size, but that idea got bashed when I saw my first ones in Munich 10 years ago....
I too was surprised at their size in real life, when I saw first live Musk Ox, in Koln back in 2001. Before then I'd only seen them in pictures or at the Natural History Museums in New York and New Haven. I saw them in a few other Belgian and German collections, and I agree, I expected them to be Bison sized. When I first saw them in the wild in Alaska....the landscape magnified their size and the illusion was complete again!
When I saw my first wild Wood Bison in northern British Columbia...it looked the size of an Elephant!
